On Friday, the Commonwealth of Virginia removed three Confederate monuments from Capitol Square, a public park and civic campus near the state Capitol in Richmond, as required by a bill passed earlier this year.
The Commonwealth of Virginia is no longer publicly displaying any monuments to the Confederate States of America on state property, according to Virginia Public Media.
The removals come after years of work at both the city and state levels to reckon with Virginia’s history of racial injustice and its legacy.
A History of Racial Injustice
Around the turn of the 20th century, decades after the Civil War, white Southerners installed monuments to the Confederacy across the South as part of a concerted effort to redeem their defeat and build cultural support for the re-establishment of white supremacy.
These monuments romanticized and glorified the effort to preserve slavery by framing Southern secession as an effort to defend local autonomy and states’ rights.
During the era of racial terror violence, disenfranchisement, and violent repression targeting African Americans that followed the Civil War, Confederate monuments, memorials, and other symbols played a vital role in restoring the racial hierarchy that would continue to dominate life in the American South and influence thinking on racial equality nationwide.
Scores of Confederate monuments were installed in the 1950s and ’60s as part of mass opposition to civil rights and racial equality. Many segregationists used Confederate symbols to brand themselves as brave protectors of their culture and champions of the struggle for states’ rights—an identity that persists today.
EJI has documented more Confederate monuments in Virginia than in any other state. The state Capitol in Richmond—the last capital of the Confederacy—displayed three Confederate monuments, including a tall likeness of Stonewall Jackson. Richmond’s “Monument Avenue” boasted five massive monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders.
Virginia’s monuments were brought into the national spotlight in 2017 when a peaceful counterprotester was violently killed as white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville to “defend” a statue of Robert E. Lee that had been slated for removal.
Reckoning with History
Dozens of Virginia’s Confederate statues were removed within two years after protesters in Richmond toppled a statue of Confederate president Jefferson Davis in June 2020.
The city of Richmond removed its last city-owned Confederate statue (to A.P. Hill) in December 2022, AP reported.
“Richmond had more Confederate monuments than any other city in the United States of America, and we were the former capital of the Confederacy,” then-Mayor Levar Stoney told AP. “And so this wasn’t just two years of work, this was a hundred years of difficult work.”
After taking down more than a dozen Confederate monuments, Mr. Stoney said he was proud of his city. “We’ve done something that a lot of communities have struggled with, and I think a ton of people are ready to turn the page.”
In July 2021, the City of Charlottesville removed two statues glorifying Confederates, including the statue of Robert E. Lee that sparked the deadly white supremacist rally nearly four years earlier.
At the state level, House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn ordered a life-sized statute of Robert E. Lee and busts of seven other Confederates removed from the Virginia Capitol in July 2020.
“Virginia has a story to tell that extends far beyond glorifying the Confederacy and its participants” who seceded in order to maintain slavery, Ms. Filler-Corn told The Washington Post. “Now is the time to provide context to our Capitol to truly tell the Commonwealth’s whole history.”
Earlier this year, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed a law that reverses a segregation era carve-out in the state’s tax code that has benefitted the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other pro-Confederate groups since the 1950s.
Often in direct response to federal desegregation efforts, these groups installed hundreds of Confederate memorials that glorify the Confederacy’s fight to preserve slavery by framing Southern secession as an effort to defend local autonomy and states’ rights.
Virginia’s effort to truthfully confront the legacy of slavery and remedy its past support for Confederate groups stands in stark contrast with the federal government’s moves to restore Confederate names to military bases and reinstall Confederate monuments.